EPISCOPAL CHU~J.IMEN ftr SOUTH Room 1005 • 853 Broadway, New York, N. Y. 10003 • Phone' (212) 477·0066 -For A Free Sout1lem AlriclI- HAY THE PACT 1981 The picture of President Ronald Reaga11 and South African Foreign 11inister Roelof Botha sit­ ting together. smiling by the fireplace in the Oval Office signifies to all the VK}rld that the new American administration is fOl"ging an alliance with the Pretoria regime. It is not surprising that it is happening; the brassiness is what astonishes. Reagan, at his request, had a 'friendly' meeting with the representative of what he described in Barch as a 'friend­ ly nation', Le., the white minority currently in control. The p"t'esident has stressed South Africa's 'production of minerals we all must have' arrl called that country 'strategically essential to the free VK}rld I. All this of course is accorr.panied by custornary incantations against apartheid and pledges to help those ~rking to remove that evil. Appeals to Presi­ dent Reagan to condemn Pretoria's revocation of the passport of Bishop Desmond 'futu - no one inside South Africa has striven harder and more peacefully for the arolition of apartheid and for reconciliation - have produced not a peep from the Hhite House. Botha came to Washington in the afterglow of the US government's 30 April veto (in which it was joined by its British and French allies) of mandatory sanctions resolutions in the UN Security Council aimed at Pretoria for its occupation of the InternatioMl Territory of Nam­ ibia and. its refusal to coop€I"'ate with the vlOrld tody in achieving independence for the Ter­ ritory. The th:r>ee-and-a-half decades-old diplomatic struggle in the United. Nations had come to fever pitch following Pretoria's abrupt break-off fJXlm the UN-sJ?Onsored preimplementation talks in Geneva in January. Despite blarxlishments from the Western 1X>wers and the timely re­ lease 0f a report on how much neighboring African states vlOuld suffer if sanctions \.,,"e.!'€ level­ ed against South Africa, the African Group pressed. ahead. This time us objections were deliv­ ered not in the dulcet language of the carter administration. Instead delegates were lectur­ ed to by Am€I"'ica.' s schoolmarm Pmbassador Jeane Kirkpatrick on being 'realistic'. The repre­ sentative of the country which went into paroxysms aoout boycotting Iran averTed that sanc­ tions'do not solve problems nor do declarations secure indepe.n::1ence. When the vote had been taken and the vetoes cast, Ugandan Ambassador Olara Otunno asked: I If sa'1Ctions do not work, why ;...~uld three permanent members of this Council cast the heavy weight of their vote against measures which do not ~r'k?' Foreign Minister> &:ltha spent ty;o days conferr'ing with Secretary of State Alexander Haig and Assistant Secretary for African Affairs-designate Chester Crocker. One topic discussed was a long-starrling difficulty between the USA and the RSA: supply of enriched ur'anium by the form­ er for South Mrica's Koeber'g nuclear pc\.;er station due to open next year. The US's Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act forbids shi:r:ments to any country: such as South Africa, which does not allow international inspection of its nuclear facilities. In the ~idst of the high-level wash­ ington talks the news broke of a US Customs seizUI-e of a planeload of military weapons and ammunition at Houston Intercontinental Airport. The $1,200,000 shipnent was said to be round for the Sudan but the British arms merchants involved had a purchase order from South Africa's P.rmaments· Corporation, Ltd, kriown as ARMSCOR. Confirmation iater came from J6r.annesburg that 'the stuff was for transshipnent to the Pl.--etoria-supported (and US government-favored) UNITA which is .trying to overtm.'Ow the government of .<\ngola. One's mind is cast back a few years when the US government made a great show of prosecuting arms dealers who had supplied haOO guns to South Africa while at the same time the CIA, State Depal:'trnent ~'1d Defp.nse Department were implementing shipne..'1ts from the Space Research Corporation of an entire heavy artillery system - 155nm howitzers, shells, techll0logy - to ARNSCOR. Considering the urgency with whi·::;:h Pretoria regards the enriched uranium) one must ask: 'WhO'S watching the other side of the c;jxJX)rt? I (continued over) THE PACT (continued) - 2 _. Namibia was a feature of the Haig-Botffi talks" '.mE WASHINGTON POST reports the South African rejected the United Nations military contingent as a police force during any internationally supervised transition in Namibia. The contemplated 7500-man UNTAG is a fundamental element in the UN plan set forth in Security Council resolution 435 of 1978" a procedure Pretoria had agreed to and had been stalling on ever since. '!HE POST adds that Botha was told by the Pmericans that eliminating UNTAG 'w:)u1d be difficult'. Not impossible. The Reagan administration has announced a policy of I constructive en­ gagement ' with the Pretoria regime, in contrast to what it termed the 'confrontation' of the Carter years. That four-year period was marked by 'delicate negotiations' be­ tween five Western countries - the USA, Britain, France, \r1est Germany arrl Canada. - arrl Pretoria which resulted in resolution 435. South Africa was left completely in control of Namibia during UN-rronitored elections, a devastating diminution of the w:)rld body's role according to Security Council resolution 385 of 1976 whereby the UN itself w:lS to 'supervise and control' the electoral process. AFRICA NEWS says a new policy paper on Namibia vas sent by Haig to Reagan, containing 'a determination that independence for the territory is in the U. S. interest but that unchecked political power for the South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO) - the political rrovement that enjoys widest international and internal support - rust be prevented' . Containment of SWAPO is no new development. Africa watchers have noted throughout the 'delicate negotiations' efforts by the Western Five to corral SWAPO and to deprive Namibia's fighting liberation rrovement of its diplomatic status as 'sole and authentic representative of the people of Namibia' which long ago had been granted it by the UN. The Western countries at the same time had cast about for a presentable, mal­ leable alternative both to SWAPO and to Pretoria's select instrument inside Namibia, the Deroocratic 'furnhalle Alliance - to no avail. A secorrl point in the policy paper was that Pretoria w:)uld ro longer accept 435. The South African regime has been screaming that the United Nations was rot impartial am therefore unfit to oversee a transition in Namibia. The new people in Washington concur, regarding the w:)rld organization as a bunch of pesky incompetents. Reagan's people, as part of forging the alliance with Pretoria, are joining wholeheartedly in a scheme to urrlermine, if not cut out altogether, the legitimate auth:>rity over the Inter'l'E.tional Territory of Namibia, the United Nations. The Americans have told Pretoria it w:)uld not have to countenance anything it doesn't like and that there will be no time limit on a Namibian 'solution'. The South Africans are having another go in trying to make credible to the Namibian people and the world their DTA collaborators. Meanwhile; Pretoria is setting in place a local bureaucracy, police and army. It continues to escalate its war against the Namibian people and a­ gainst Angola. The Western powers are busy constructing bonds on a future Namibian gov­ errment - mindful that SWAPO w:)uld win any fair and free election. N3.mibia must have a pre-election constitutional guarantee of minority rights - in eerie contrast to the West's virtual silence over the years at Pretoria's v.ar against the Namibian people. Holdings of South African, US, British and other foreign corporations, which have been exploiting"the minerally wealthy Ter'ritory for decades, must rot be nationalized. Nam­ ibia JIUst be a neutral state, not host to any gr'Oup hostile to a neighboring state - a strange dernan:1 after the South African Defence Force's constant assaults on Angola an::l Zambia arxl tbzarnbique which the Western powers have never' distinctly condemned. 'The South African cabinet's response to Haig's proposals is said to be 'positive'. Wash­ ington will give no details. The Western countries pick up again the nettlesane problem of Namibia and an 'internationally acceptable solution', the USA taking the lea:l. Vice President George Bush boasted the US's advocacy of Namibian independence is one of the Reagan administration's I positive foreign and. defense policy developnents', revealing in the context of the American government's concept of global struggle against what it regards as international terrorism directed from Moscow and its total and deliber'ate ignorance of the upthrust of ron-aligned nations for self-determination. '/; '/; ,': * Bishop Reeves and the Rev Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, meeting New York, JuZy Z957. - photo by Oscar' J. CaUeru:1er, Jr + Gt.W\byose Reeves IQ99 - /990 Ambrose Reeves, whose adult life and ministry was spent in tenacious and eloquent fighting for human rights - notably as the Anglican Bishop of Johannesburg from 1949 to 1960, died in England on 23 December 1980. Bishop Reeves had shortly before his death been selected by the African National Congress of South Africa to recelve its highest honor the Isitwalandwe, meaning literally 'the one who wears the plumes of the rare bird '. , ECSA salutes a dear friend and a gallant warrior. EPISCOPAL CHU~IIMEN for Room 1005 • 853 Broadway, New York, N.